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Tinkerer’s Sunset

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Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset

#41

Post by orangecat »

yan wrote: post #26
rosser wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Tinkerable" and "steep learning curve" are orthogonal. In fact, what the article's author is decrying is that this thing without a steep learning curve is completely un-tinkerable. That, per his argument, is what will cost us some chunk of the next generation of programmers -- that, in pursuit of ease of adoption (and/or control), Apple has lopped off tinkerability. You're absolutely right: if I want to tinker, I ha…

> All she knows is, "Wouldn't it be cool if my iPad had ... ?" or "Wow, I wish I could ... " And the tool she has not only gives her no ability to explore those possibilities, it looks like it's designed to actively impede her from exploring them. While I understand this argument has no right or wrong answers, I can't say I agree to the above statement. Just by the virtue of having a well-designed piece of hardware i…

If it was an open platform, it would most likely have been of lower quality

That doesn't follow at all. Is Mac OS X of "lower quality" because anybody can write and distribute apps for it? Does the existence of the "allow non-market apps" checkbox in Android make it worse?

Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset

#42

Post by Super_Jambo »

Economic rules only exist to serve society.

The iPad & iPhone lockdown are simply a way for apple to give themselves a monopoly on software and content sales.

It's leveraging success in one market (shiny looking hardware) into dominance in another (content provision, software sales)

If they keep it up and are successful you can bet your ass the regulators will fine them for it, it's far more destructive than MS bundling media player.

Of course the end service may be better, but thats neither here nor there, it's hugely anti-competitive.

Does rather depend how in-thrall to no-regulation academics & business leaders our politicians get though.

Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset

#43

Post by mgunes »

aristoxenus wrote: post #5
jdminhbg wrote: post #3

This whole tinkering panic is ridiculous. Did tinkering end when Nintendo released the NES? Or more recently with the Wii? His dad could have bought a word processor instead of a ][e, would he have been able to tinker with that? Some devices are more open than others. This is not a new phenomenon, nor did anything change on Wednesday.

Seriously, you guys are making me sad. Use some imagination -- there is a lot more to tinker with for your dollar in 2010 than there was in the good old days. For the price of your dad's ][e you can now buy multiple linux boxes, a bucket of Arduinos or a NerdKit, robotic legos, and -- if you are so inclined -- an iPad with developer account on top of it. At first I was wondering what the ulterior motive to all this d…

The concern is not with whether there are enough machines to tinker with today or whether there will be that many five years down the line. The concern is with what kind of computing culture is being instilled by the largest mobile computing device manufacturer of the world, which also happens to be one of the most inspiring connoisseurs of interaction design of the last two decades. And where this will lead what we know as "computing" to on the 20-year scale.

It's certain that people who already know that hacking and tinkering is what they want to do with computers will find enough suitably priced computers to tinker with in the next 20 years. Nobody is debating that. The concern is over whether the potential-tinkerers of the years beyond will be able to discover hacking through the immanent curiosity of young age when they run into walls of the kind that Apple is surrounding their products with today.

Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset

#44

Post by pyre »

gfodor wrote: post #32

The iPad has really brought out a lot of old, crochety "well in my day" engineers that are now to the point where its embarassing. The iPad will draw more people towards software engineering, because for the first time we will have a general purpose computer that doesn't suck horribly for normal people. It will be cool. It will be fun. Passion for software has little to do with how much you can "hack" down to the har…

> They can, of course, jailbreak.

Why do people insist that 'jail-breaking' is some sort of valid option?

* If Apple had their way even jail-breaking would be illegal.

* Jail-breaking is dependent on security holes in the operating system (i.e. the same way that you are jail-breaking your iPhone is the same way that blackhats could take it over)

* Jail-breaking breaks on most updates.

Why do people think that it is impossible for Apple to make some sort of button that says, "Yes. I want to enter 'tinker mode' my iPhone/iPad. I realize that this will void my software (maybe hardware?) support from Apple."

[EDIT]

> Just look at the Jailbroken iPhone ecosystem for an idea of what that would look like. It's great if you're a hacker, but it would have destroyed the platform.

That's a strawman. If the system was open, would all of those Apps on the AppStore right not just vanish? People wouldn't have bothered to develop for the iPhone at all? What about the people that didn't develop neat apps for the iPhone (that are impossible under the SDK) because the 'jail-broken' community is so small and not officially sanctioned? (Or just because of all of the issues with jail-breaking I mentioned above?)

Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset

#45

Post by mechanical_fish »

mgunes wrote: post #43
aristoxenus wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, you guys are making me sad. Use some imagination -- there is a lot more to tinker with for your dollar in 2010 than there was in the good old days. For the price of your dad's ][e you can now buy multiple linux boxes, a bucket of Arduinos or a NerdKit, robotic legos, and -- if you are so inclined -- an iPad with developer account on top of it. At first I was wondering what the ulterior motive to all this d…

The concern is not with whether there are enough machines to tinker with today or whether there will be that many five years down the line. The concern is with what kind of computing culture is being instilled by the largest mobile computing device manufacturer of the world, which also happens to be one of the most inspiring connoisseurs of interaction design of the last two decades. And where this will lead what we…

walls of the kind that Apple is surrounding their products with today

When I learned to program in the 1980s, I taught myself Pascal from a book. Three years later I encountered my first Pascal compiler, through a summer program at a local university, because the sticker price for Apple Pascal was $495 when it came out in 1979 (in 2009 dollars, that would be over $1000) and I was a kid.

(The PC folks were luckier by the time I was coding... Turbo Pascal came out for $50 in 1984. That's only $100 in 2009 dollars. Too bad I couldn't afford to change hardware...)

Now I can pay Apple $99 per year (in 2009 dollars) and get the ability to write iPhone programs, using pro-level tools, and install any iPhone program I want on my personal phone and those of my friends. Or I can build a web app in Javascript or Ruby or whatever and share it with all my friends, without asking anyone's permission, for $9 a month in hosting. (Or pay-as-you-go hosting on the cloud, if uptime is no concern.) Or, if I really want a machine that is completely open and ready to run Linux on, I can buy one for pocket change. I've literally given away the equivalent of three Linux PCs in the last few months because I don't have enough space in the back of my closet.

(The latter is a particularly important point. One reason closed hardware is growing in popularity is that there is so much other cheap hardware out there. Back when a computer cost $2500 it was relatively important to make sure that you could run whatever software you needed on that one computer. Now, if someone offers you a machine that's sealed against malware -- with the caveat that it's also sealed against anyone who won't pay an extra $99, including you -- it's a lot more tempting, because, hey, if Computer A won't run your software we can just buy Computer B, C, or D, new, for a few hundred bucks. Or one can just walk down the street on trash day and pick up potential Linux PCs. I'm just not seeing these signs of Nerd Apocalypse.)

Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset

#46

Post by smokey_the_bear »

pyre wrote: post #44
gfodor wrote: post #32

The iPad has really brought out a lot of old, crochety "well in my day" engineers that are now to the point where its embarassing. The iPad will draw more people towards software engineering, because for the first time we will have a general purpose computer that doesn't suck horribly for normal people. It will be cool. It will be fun. Passion for software has little to do with how much you can "hack" down to the har…

> They can, of course, jailbreak. Why do people insist that 'jail-breaking' is some sort of valid option? * If Apple had their way even jail-breaking would be illegal. * Jail-breaking is dependent on security holes in the operating system (i.e. the same way that you are jail-breaking your iPhone is the same way that blackhats could take it over) * Jail-breaking breaks on most updates. Why do people think that it is i…

Jailbreaking is particularly annoying to me as an app developer. My phone was jailbroken before I started writing apps, but I've had to keep it clean in order to get the necessary OS updates, and to have the same environment as most of users. But we have a fair number of users with jailbroken phones who like to use our app with external GPS devices on iPod touches, and it's really hard to support them.

Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset

#47

Post by [deleted] »

mbrubeck wrote: post #23
oconnor0 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtual machines are against Apple's App Store's TOS?

"No interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)." -- Apple iPhone SDK agreement

[deleted]

Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset

#48

Post by mgunes »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #45
mgunes wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concern is not with whether there are enough machines to tinker with today or whether there will be that many five years down the line. The concern is with what kind of computing culture is being instilled by the largest mobile computing device manufacturer of the world, which also happens to be one of the most inspiring connoisseurs of interaction design of the last two decades. And where this will lead what we…

walls of the kind that Apple is surrounding their products with today When I learned to program in the 1980s, I taught myself Pascal from a book. Three years later I encountered my first Pascal compiler, through a summer program at a local university, because the sticker price for Apple Pascal was $495 when it came out in 1979 (in 2009 dollars, that would be over $1000) and I was a kid. (The PC folks were luckier by…

That's a good argument; one that I've seen raised in favor of web apps in the ChromeOS context multiple times. I have no doubt that Nerd Apocalypse in your sense is not on the radar. The question I'm trying to raise (and I'm really trying to raise a question; not defending one model or the other, at least not yet) is not essentially about the economics, though.

I'm wondering how likely it is for a child to get curious about what this "computing" thing is, discover the basic distinction between hardware and software, wonder how one goes beyond the software that ships as default with the device, how one makes a computer do something vaguely defined, random, outside the intended use scenarios, fun, or extremely specific, with an iPad, Chrome OS device, or similar future sandboxed information appliance. How much more or less likely it is compared to a 386DX with a bulky CRT, that runs DOS and expects the user to type a word by default, or an Amiga 500 that expects the user to insert a floppy by default. Getting curious in the first place is a prerequisite; it comes before one can consider paying Apple $99 a year to get the tools with which to satisfy that curiosity.

My line of thinking is that we're witnessing not a huge shift in what personal computing is defined as, but the gradual total disappearance of what we've come to know as computing from the retail market in favour of narrowly targeted information appliances with intentional limitations that aim to make "computing" invisible in the whole experience. It's true that these devices will not saturate or dominate the market any time soon. But the number of pockets that vote for them will definitely bias the industry towards a specific direction, and the culture they create in this decade will set the tone for the culture of the next era, just like how our past experiences with Pascal, Windows 3.1, DOS, what have you, influence the way we evaluate today's technology.

Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset

#49

Post by noonespecial »

The funny part is that they (Apple) are waging war against those grown tinkers that they created. The sweet irony doesn't stop there. Today's little hackers are just as motivated to seize control of their technological world as those in past years. I have learned from watching my own children that just about nothing can stop a motivated child.

All they are doing with their endless keys and locks and walled gardens is creating an unstoppable army of new hackers for whom the latest and greatest "content protection system" won't even be worth a raised eyebrow and for whom the legal harassment has become nothing more than background noise.

Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset

#50

Post by ghshephard »

Tinkering now moves to "Meta Tinkering" - as it always has, to some degree There was a time when Tinkering involved modifying the OpCodes/Circuitry of your Computer - 1950 - 1970s. Then Tinkering involved programming the computer, with little ability to touch the hardware or modify the CPU, using assembler, compilers, interpreters.

The next generation is the creation of Meta-Environments, in which tinkering allows us to go back to first principles, _create_ circuits, OpCodes, and generally understand the Computing Universe from it's bare components - http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&#38... Has been the most fun I've had in a Decade, and I'm pretty sure any smart kid, around the 8-10+ age, can start to mull through most of it's components.

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